i never go anywhere without a camera. i drink to get drunk. comfortable with technology, but not a geek. write for the satisfaction, not the story. take people's advice, but careful of their opinions.

Friday, September 05, 2014

Ibeacons and the new iphone launch

Apple is about to announce the new iphone (iphone6) on the 9th September and the rumor is they will be unveiling a new payment system.

I've been dabbling with the new ibeacons and the native passbook app. The following scenario is how I want apple to use these to facilitate payment through ios:

A shopkeeper in a local cafe uses their shop ipad as an ibeacon receiver, alerting local ios devices of the shop, it's products and prices when they are in the shop.

When a customer walks in, they allow their device to be discoverable by that shops ibeacon and their customer id pops up on the register.

They take a seat and select a coffee from the cafés pop up menu on their ios device. The order appears on the shop ipad with the customers name, table number and details about the order. They make the coffee and call the customers name for collection. The worker selects 'payment' on the ipad screen which sends the payment request to the customers ios device.

The customer collects their coffee and hits "pay" on the pop up payment request. A receipt is added to their records folder on Dropbox. Their loyalty card in the passbook app is automatically updated.

As the customer leaves they either manually checkout of the shop to disconnect from the ibeacon or it is automatically disconnected as they leave the range of the ibeacon.

Additional areas they can be added to this are:

- social, checking in automatically, seeing what friends have ordered at this shop, reviews

- unlocking loyalty rewards and discounts

- proximity advertising and ability to send offers to people passing by

- peer to peer payment

- integrating ios payment options with a simple register interface

It will be interesting to see what apple unveils next week. As someone that has small businesses it would be great to reduce merchant fees for eftpos machines.